Hair plays an impor­tant role in the female world. Many women are defined by their outer appear­ance. Hav­ing beau­ti­ful healthy hair is a part of the equa­tion that women use to mea­sure their beauty and appear­ance. Although hair loss in women is just as com­mon as it is in men, it is more dif­fi­cult to deal with. Hair loss occurs for a wide vari­ety of rea­sons and there are a hand­ful causes at the cen­ter of this problem.

One doc­u­mented med­ical con­di­tion know to com­monly to cause hair loss in women is menopause. When a woman begins to enter menopause the lev­els of estro­gen in the body begins to decrease. Estro­gen is needed to help pro­duce testos­terone. The cor­rect lev­els of testos­terone make it pos­si­ble for hair to con­tinue to grow and main­tain a healthy cycle. With­out enough estro­gen and testos­terone the growth of hair begins to slow result­ing in hair loss.

Women pat­tern bald­ness is typ­i­cally the thin­ning of the hair on the top of the scalp. For many, it can get quite thin, leav­ing women feel­ing very inse­cure and try­ing dif­fer­ent hair­styles to con­ceal the prob­lem. Unfor­tu­nately, they usu­ally opt for styles which can fur­ther dam­age hair fol­li­cles, lead­ing to more thinning.

In the past, women teased their hair, pulled it back in pony tails, or permed it to hide their secret. But, now there is some­thing that can be done to treat this prob­lem. In fact, if it is caught in time, hair can be regrown by using the proper treatment.

When it comes to hair loss the male and female pop­u­la­tion will have expe­ri­enced it before the age 30. How­ever, the process of hair bald­ness dif­fers for each indi­vid­ual. For a num­ber of peo­ple, bald­ness is a genetic con­di­tion like andro­genic alope­cia or pro­gres­sive hair thin­ning, which is a com­mon type of hair loss.

Hair­line in women will not recede as com­pared to men; how­ever, the hair becomes thin­ner all over the head and it may lead to total bald­ness. While men at age 20 or even less get reced­ing hair­lines that look like a let­ter M, wherein hair thin­ning will start at the crown and around the sides of the head.

Another con­di­tion or type that causes hair loss is the alope­cia areata; it is often called spot hair bald­ness and occurs in all areas of the body caus­ing loss of hair, espe­cially on the scalp. There are two types of alope­cia: while alope­cia totalis is a total hair loss on the scalp, the alope­cia uni­ver­salis is a total loss of all body hair.

What­ever term suits the descrip­tion or dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of hair loss, hair bald­ness, or hair bald­ing, the fact still lies that at some point in an individual’s life the process of going bald may occur. Dev­as­tat­ing as it may seem there are solu­tions and var­i­ous options for hair loss suf­fer­ers and if prop­erly treated in the early stages the pro­gres­sion can be put to a halt.

Make sure to pick up NEWSWEEK dou­ble issue: MAY 24 & 31, 2010

John Kahen, M.D the founder and med­ical direc­tor of Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion is cur­rently fea­tured in NEWSWEEK mag­a­zine, an exclu­sive issue fea­tur­ing BEST DOCTORS IN THE GREATER LOS ANGELES.

With today’s advances in cos­metic surgery hair loss suf­fer­ers can regrow the hair they lost with a hair trans­plant pro­ce­dure, but the harsh real­ity is not every­one is a can­di­date. To be a pos­si­ble can­di­date you must have a suf­fi­cient amount of donor hair. The most com­mon donor site for hair trans­plant surgery is on the head.  If the sides and back of your head have full lus­trous hair, you are in luck.  This hair can be used as donor hair to replace hair you have lost on your bald­ing spots.  If your hair in these areas is not healthy, you face a dif­fi­cult problem.

If you have lost your hair due to genet­ics, or a fam­ily his­tory, you will likely be a good can­di­date for hair trans­plant surgery.  Men who have hair loss in their fam­i­lies usu­ally have a good idea of the way the bald­ness pat­tern will play out.

Your rel­a­tives may have had hair that went bald into a horse­shoe pat­tern and held at that stage.  If this is the case, your sur­geon will know what to expect.  Then, he can take hair from the sides and back of your head as donor hair and per­form the hair transplant.

If you have lost your hair because of some kind of trauma or burns, you will also make a good can­di­date for hair trans­plant surgery.  This is because the hair you still have will prob­a­bly still be healthy.  It will pro­vide good donor hair for your hair trans­plant.  The most likely sit­u­a­tion is that you will have enough hair to make this pos­si­ble.  How­ever, if you have lost too much hair, a hair trans­plant may not be possible.

Hair loss suf­fers can ben­e­fit greatly from hair trans­plant surgery. The first step towards find­ing out if you’re a good can­di­date is sched­ul­ing a con­sul­ta­tion with at hair restora­tion sur­geon. At the time of the con­sult the Doc­tor will make a com­plete assess­ment and dis­cuss the options best to fit your indi­vid­ual needs.

Hair restora­tion pro­ce­dures have changed in the decades since they were first done. The ear­lier meth­ods of using hair plugs were not accept­able to soci­ety. Hair trans­plant patients appeared to have doll like hair. Now hair trans­plants are more nat­ural look­ing due to the inno­v­a­tive meth­ods being used, such as micro grafting.

In gen­eral, most hair trans­plant surg­eries today involve micro graft­ing. Micro grafts hold about 1–3 or four hair fol­li­cles. Older style hair grafts often held on aver­age a dozen hair fol­li­cles. These new micro grafts are only pos­si­ble because skilled sur­geons have refined their method of extract­ing them.

Micro grafts are use­ful in hair trans­plant surgery because they can give the hair a quite nat­ural appear­ance. The hair emerges from the scalp in the most nat­ural way, with the same num­ber of hairs that nature intended. If the pro­ce­dure is done cor­rectly, no one can tell the difference.

Pre­vi­ously, when hair plugs were used, doc­tors did the hair trans­plant surg­eries much dif­fer­ently. They used an instru­ment called a trephine to cut cir­cu­lar grafts from 2mm to 5mm in diam­e­ter. These plugs were inserted into the bald­ing area.

Finally, the micro grafts will be fin­ished by being divided into indi­vid­ual grafts by using a stere­omi­cro­scope. The sur­gi­cal team will make a vari­ety of grafts from eight-shaft mini grafts to one or two shaft micro grafts. These will be moved dur­ing hair trans­plant to the recip­i­ent sites so that the hair will have a nat­ural hair­line with full­ness on top.

Old Style grafts are cir­cu­lar pieces of scalp con­tain­ing any­where from 7–15 hair fol­li­cles. This old-fashioned tech­nique, is not typ­i­cally used today, how­ever some­times they are com­bined with smaller min­i­grafts and micro­grafts to cre­ate a more nat­ural appear­ance. Since the 1970’s through the 1980’s hair trans­plan­ta­tion with Old Style grafts, or “plugs” as they are com­monly referred to, was the stan­dard method of sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion. Presently most hair trans­plants are accom­plished with min­i­grafts and micro­grafts alone. This tech­nique is also used to revise unsightly hair­lines caused by old tech­niques such as “plugs”.

Revi­sion of the hair line can be restored by a sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion sur­geon, with immense prac­tice of today’s inno­v­a­tive tech­niques. Meth­ods such as, stereo­scopic micro­scope dis­sect­ing gives sur­geons a greatly enlarged and, there­fore com­pletely clear view of the struc­ture of your hair and the way it is placed in its nat­ural state. This enables sur­geons to work with great pre­ci­sion between each fol­lic­u­lar unit and pre­serve not only the hair but also its vital struc­tures such as the seba­ceous glands and the hair roots. With­out the stereo­scopic micro­scope, there is a dan­ger that the sur­geon could cut through some of the hairs vital struc­tures and dam­age them in the process. Grafts trans­planted with the stereo­scopic micro­scope will be health­ier and there­fore will grow more vig­or­ously.

Hair restora­tion rever­sals are usu­ally designed to repair poor hair trans­plants rather than return a patient to his orig­i­nal bald state. In most cases, the “rever­sal” actu­ally involves more grafts being added to the pre­vi­ous trans­plant. Today, most pro­fes­sion­als refer to hair trans­plant rever­sals as “repairs” to be more pre­cise about the nature of the operation.

There are two types of hair-transplant rever­sal. A real rever­sal involves the phys­i­cal removal from the head of the hair plugs or grafts. A hair repair, on the other hand, adds more hair to alter the hair­line and hide the poor work­man­ship of the first trans­plant. The effects of hair-transplant rever­sals vary widely depend­ing on why the first trans­plant did not work. If you are sim­ply unre­cep­tive to the process, you may end up deal­ing with more of the same prob­lems if only part of the hair “takes” or you do not get the nat­ural look you hoped for. On the other hand, if the ini­tial prob­lem was a lack of skill on the part of the sur­geon, a rever­sal will likely solve the prob­lem by hid­ing the scars or other cos­metic issues the first trans­plant did not solve.

There are sev­eral vari­a­tions avail­able and the most pop­u­lar and effec­tive of which include:

Hair Trans­plant Surgery

Hair trans­plan­ta­tion is a pro­ce­dure in which the sur­geon removes areas of hair-bearing scalp from the back or sides of the head and inserts the grafts  to the bald­ing areas. The rec­og­niz­able term for this tech­nique is ‘graft­ing’. The newly relo­cated hairs grows in the trans­planted areas that were pre­vi­ously bald. Once the hairs are trans­planted they are per­ma­nent and can be treated such as you would normally.

Hair flap surgery

Best choice for men with severe bald­ness. It involves a large flap of skin, on which hair is alive and grow­ing, to be pulled from the back and sides over the top sur­face area of the bald spot. It is then sur­gi­cally attached into place. The hair re-roots and begins to grow from its new loca­tion, ulti­mately elim­i­nat­ing any hair­less area.

Scalp tis­sue expansion

A balloon-type mech­a­nism is care­fully inserted under the scalp through an inci­sion. A salt-water con­coc­tion is added to slowly fill this bal­loon over time even­tu­ally caus­ing a swelling and stretch­ing of the scalp. The loose­ness actu­ally causes new skin cells to grow. After about two months this skin can be relo­cated to the area of bald­ness effec­tively mov­ing the hair to cover the spot.

Scalp reduc­tion surgery

 Also known as ‘advanced flap surgery’ since it is sim­i­lar in prin­ci­ple except a sec­tion of the bald scalp is actu­ally removed; rather than just pulling the skin over the hair­less spot. With the reduc­tion the sur­round­ing areas are actu­ally pulled up and con­nected in place of the absent scalp.

The roots of mod­ern day were cul­ti­vated in Japan in the late 1930s. In 1939, Japan­ese der­ma­tol­o­gist Dr. Okuda detailed his ground­break­ing work in sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion for burn vic­tims. He described using a punch tech­nique to extract round sec­tions of hair-bearing skin, which were then implanted into slightly smaller round holes made in the scarred or burned areas of the scalps of his patients. After the skin grafts healed, they con­tin­ued to pro­duce hair in the pre­vi­ously bald areas of scalp. In 1943 another Japan­ese der­ma­tol­o­gist refined Okuda’s tech­nique by using sig­nif­i­cantly smaller grafts of one to three hairs to replace lost pubic hair in his female patients.

In 1952, Dr. Nor­man Oren­tre­ich, a New York der­ma­tol­o­gist, per­formed the first known hair trans­plant in the U.S. on a man suf­fer­ing from male pat­tern bald­ing. Oren­tre­ich essen­tially rein­vented modern-day hair transplantation.

Seven years later, after much crit­i­cism, Oren­tre­ich pub­lished his find­ings and set forth his the­ory of “donor dom­i­nance” in the Annals of the New York Acad­emy of Sci­ences. His work demon­strated that the hair from the back and the sides of a man’s scalp was for the most part resis­tant to the bald­ing process. How­ever, his tech­nique mir­rored the less aes­thet­i­cally “punch graft” process of Okuda instead of the more nat­ural, smaller graft­ing tech­nique of Tamura.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion pro­duced natural-looking results. Newer tech­niques, such as fol­lic­u­lar unit micro graft­ing, fol­lic­u­lar unit trans­plan­ta­tion, and fol­lic­u­lar unit extrac­tion, have made hair trans­plan­ta­tion a vir­tu­ally unde­tectable, viable option for many.

When con­sid­er­ing under­go­ing any type of cos­metic surgery, being con­cerned that there will be prob­lems or side – effects is very nat­ural. Learn­ing the facts is vital for relief of any emo­tions that may be caus­ing hes­i­tance to go for­ward with a pro­ce­dure. Hair restora­tion is a sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure that both men and women are embark­ing to per­ma­nently cor­rect their hair loss.

Hair restora­tion is not a major surgery in fact it is com­monly thought to be eas­ier than vis­it­ing your den­tist. It is an out­pa­tient pro­ce­dure and per­formed with a local anes­thetic. Your scalp is numbed and you are relaxed in a reclined posi­tion while the pro­ce­dure is being per­formed. After your hair trans­plant pro­ce­dure is com­plete you return home that same day and can carry on with the major­ity of your nor­mal activ­i­ties. Patients have even reported no pain and return to work the next day because there are no clear signs of hav­ing a hair trans­plant pro­ce­dure. Anti– inflam­ma­tory med­ica­tion is com­monly pre­scribed to con­trol and reduce any pos­si­ble swelling.

A com­mon ques­tion asked by indi­vid­u­als con­sid­er­ing hair restora­tion is, will there be any scar­ring? Scar­ring in the area where the hair fol­li­cles were implanted is extremely rare. In the area where the donor hair was removed, a trchophytic closer tech­nique is used to elim­i­nate any scar­ring; even under close scrutiny scar­ing is unde­tectable. With all of the mod­ern devel­op­ment in hair replace­ment ther­apy, hair restora­tion is a sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure that has been suc­cess­fully sat­is­fy­ing hair loss patients. In the com­ing post-operative months their hair will begin to grow and thicken, and pos­i­tively impact­ing the rest of their lives.